Ivory and Deep Red Medallion Tabriz, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Hand-knotted from wool with silk, with a natural fringe at both ends. The silk carries the palmettes and blossoms, which at this scale are only a few millimetres across; it holds a crisp edge where wool alone would round them, and gives the drawing a sheen that lifts it from the ivory.

Wool and silk shrink at different rates, so this rug must never be washed, steamed or shampooed — any deep clean is a job for a specialist in mixed-fibre rugs. The ivory field is the vulnerable part: it is the palest thing here, it makes up most of the surface, and it has no dark ground to hide a mark.

Look at what is inside the medallion and then at what is outside it. The same things are there: the same small palmettes, the same round blossoms, the same serrated leaves turning on their stems. Nothing has been redrawn for the centre. The medallion is defined by one change only — the ground beneath the drawing switches from ivory to deep red — and the cusped outline traces where that switch happens.

It is a quieter way of building a centre than most rugs use. The usual approach gives the medallion its own vocabulary, a starburst or a rosette or a lattice that appears nowhere else, so it reads as a separate object placed on the field. Here the field simply continues and the colour beneath it changes, which is why the medallion feels grown out of the rug rather than laid on top of it. The same trick is repeated twice more: the pendants above and below, and the spandrels in the four corners, are also just the field on a different ground — red for the pendants, sage for the corners. Three ground colours, one set of flowers.